INTO OBLIVION

DOUBLE FEATURE
In the early 1940s Stalin decided to build a railway line that would transverse the Siberian Taiga and link up uninhabited outposts along the northern Polar Circle. But as soon as construction commenced (under Stalin’s direct command), the hopelessness of the venture became apparent. The proposed route crossed permafrost areas and marshlands, and the deployment of unsuitable technologies and deficient equipment put paid to any last hopes that the project was feasible. The labourers deployed – almost exclusively inmates from the notorious gulags – suffered horrendously under the inhumane working conditions, the frost and the blizzards, the mosquitoes, the permanent undernourishment. In 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, work was terminated with immediate effect. The railroad, which in the foregoing six years of construction had reached a length of 699 kilometres and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of forced labourers, was never completed. Šimon Špidla embarked on a meditative journey along the Salekhard-Igarka line, Stalin’s “railroad of death”, producing a minimalist film in which the camera searches an abandoned camp for traces and records of the people who lived and worked there more than 60 years ago.